The Chronicles of Narcissists

Vauhini Vara — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:00:28 +0000

Hal Niedzviecki explores the motives, technologies, and consequences of Peep Culture.

Technology has always had a mixed effect on private lives. When the U.S. Postal Service was established in the 18^th century, it made it much easier and faster for people to get in touch, but it wasn’t uncommon in the first few years for people to open and read one another’s mail. The introduction of the telephone in the late 19th century also had a transformative effect on communication—but for decades a private conversation could easily be eavesdropped upon by curious neighbors, or suspicious government officials.

In that context, it isn’t all that surprising that a host of recent developments have ignited a new debate about the social costs and benefits of technology. But the unprecedented rate of change in recent years has brought the debate to a fever pitch. Not only do we now have social-networking websites like Facebook and Twitter (do they help us stay in touch or do they trick us into exposing our personal information?), but we also have software that can track a person’s whereabouts (useful or dangerous?) and new video-editing technology that has made it possible to splice reality into reality television (improving our ability to relate to others or irreparably blurring the line between private and public?).

In The Peep Diaries, social critic Hal Niedzviecki terms this phenomenon “Peep Culture” and uses himself as a guinea pig to explore—and attempt to analyze—the world of Peep. He examines and pokes fun at all the ordinary people who believe their private lives deserve to be seen and their half-baked thoughts deserve to be heard. These people range from bloggers to reality television stars, from Facebook users to people who pose naked on the Internet, and from people who post online product reviews to those who spy on their wives and husbands.

Niedzviecki’s own tentative forays into the world of Peep sometimes work to entertaining effect—for instance, when he throws a “Facebook party,” with a guest list made of all the people he has befriended on Facebook, and only one person shows up. (If this sounds familiar, it may be because he wrote about the experience last year in The New York Times Magazine.)

Hal Niedzviecki

At other times, though, his efforts fall flat. In a chapter about reality TV, he sets out to audition for a Discovery Channel show but goes only as far as filling out a boring questionnaire that asks about his profession and wilderness experience before bailing on the opportunity—thus passing up a chance to give readers behind-the-scenes insight into reality TV culture. When he decides to track his wife with a GPS device, he warns her in advance, losing the opportunity for a useful lesson on the ways technology can affect relationships. (When he later asks her about a stop she made on the way to work, she explains that she bought a sandwich, mostly “to give me something to look at while I tracked her.”)

This half-heartedness could be overlooked if Niedzviecki addressed the question that seems central to his book: Why has Peep Culture arisen and how has it changed us, for the better and for the worse? The Peep Diaries circles around this question, even guessing at a few answers, but Niedzviecki has trouble laying out a cogent argument that would make those guesses persuasive. He suggests that in our post-industrial society, “we want to connect, desperately, existentially, inherently. We’re willing to reveal ourselves for little or no reason even against our own best interests if only that we might, for a moment or two, alleviate the loneliness we feel all around us.” But, he adds, “Behind the locked doors of our castles we sit alone, desperately trying [to] stave off the inevitable discouragement, depression and anxiety that are the by-products of our anti-human society.” Wow. This would be a compelling, even believable, claim, if only Niedzviecki backed it up with some research—whether through interviews with Peep practitioners or quantitative studies on the matter. But, here and elsewhere, he fails to do so.

In the last few pages of the book, Niedzviecki even seems to admit he hasn’t quite wrapped his mind around the issue of Peep: “When I first conceived of this book I thought I would be able to end with a rallying cry. I wasn’t sure which way I’d go—pro or anti-Peep… But I’m at the end of the book and I’m as undecided as ever.” In other words, Niedzviecki knows he has no satisfying conclusions—either for himself or for his readers.

The most successful Peep practitioners, of course, do add value to the rest of our lives—whether they’re reality stars entertaining us with their antics (I know there are readers who got at least as teary-eyed as I did during the season finale of The Hills) or friends telling us things we should know (when Arlen Specter became a Democrat, I learned of it from a friend’s Tweet). I began The Peep Diaries expecting the same from Niedzviecki: that he would either entertain me or tell me something I should know—preferably both. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t do either of those things often enough.

Life in the Woods

Vauhini Vara — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:00:52 +0000

Peter Rock’s darkly evocative fifth novel follows a father and daughter’s underground existence in a city park.

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote about his urge to grab and devour a live woodchuck so he could taste the animal’s “wildness.” It’s an admission that seems to say more, specifically, about Thoreau himself than it does, generally, about man’s relationship to nature—and as such, it’s enthralling. Peter Rock’s My Abandonment, written in the voice of a young girl living secretly in a forest, is at its best in similar moments.

When we meet Caroline, she’s living with her Thoreau- and Emerson-quoting father in a secret hideaway in Portland’s Forest Park. She learns about the outside world by reading a partial set of encyclopedias, and every once in a while, she and her father—actually, he’s called “Father,” with a capital F—venture to Safeway for a grocery run. But this existence is threatened when they’re discovered by city authorities, forcing them to conform to mainstream society or flee back under the forest’s dark cover. It doesn’t take them long to choose the latter option, and when they do, the novel enters its darkest and most compelling place.

One gets the sense that Rock, a Portland resident who has written four novels before this, must himself have spent many hours wandering Forest Park with his notebook in hand—he renders Caroline’s world with great authority and rich detail. Though the story is based on true events, it quickly becomes Caroline’s own. In her words, the leaves atop trees “are like lace,” and half-fallen trees “groan” in the wind. At times, Caroline’s observations hint at the creepy turn her story will take: “Sometimes a stone will roll up a hill,” she notices early on. “Or a stone will leap in the air and rap against another stone or a tree like he is angry at them. I have seen this happen.”

Peter Rock

Rock’s decision to tell the story in the voice of a thirteen-year-old presents certain difficulties, though, especially early in the novel. He goes so far as to give the story’s grammar over to her: “Once a person knows how to talk they know how unless they have a sore throat but that can’t last forever and even then you can whisper.” And this: “Our green Coleman stove and our kettle and our pots and pans and everything is gone just like I said they would be taken.” After reading enough of these, one finds oneself wishing that Rock would step in to reclaim just a little authorial control from precocious Caroline’s hands.

Caroline’s naiveté can also feel distancing to an adult reader. When she ventures into Portland proper and sees that a theater is playing the movie The Blair Witch Project, she asks Father, “Is that about witches?” After she witnesses a young couple getting naked in the woods, she tells Father that they must have been trying “to see what their bodies looked like.”

But as the story grows darker and more complicated, so does its protagonist. After being found out by city officials, Caroline and Father are given a place to live—a modest farmhouse, near which Father can work and Caroline can attend school. But Father, a war veteran, believes their moves are being tracked by an elusive “them.” He tells Caroline to pack her belongings, and the two prepare to go into hiding again.

To say what unravels next would spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that Caroline’s perception of danger in her midst, early in the novel (“I have seen a fallen tree slowly right itself and its dead branches will sprout leaves”), begins to make quite a bit more sense, from a psychological standpoint. As Father drags daughter along on his rambling flight from civilization, My Abandonment turns into a novel not about the relationship between man and nature, but about that between a girl and her father—and it’s there that Rock’s story is at its scariest and most evocative.

The Rumpus.net » Vauhini Vara

The Chronicles of Narcissists

Hal Niedzviecki explores the motives, technologies, and consequences of Peep Culture.

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Life in the Woods

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